Ristampe Storiche #2

A remarkable piece of comics history, this 2004 Comicon Edizioni release presents "Histoire de Mr. Lajaunisse," spotlighted here as the first comics album written and drawn in France. The cover — rendered entirely by Cham — depicts a lively scene featuring a rotund, wide-eyed gentleman being attended to (or perhaps accosted) by a figure in a blue medical coat, with a blonde woman reacting dramatically in the foreground. It's a wonderfully expressive tableau that captures the playful, irreverent spirit of 19th-century French sequential art, faithfully reproduced for modern readers.